Elon Musk reportedly had his own tweets prioritized out of jealousy
engadget.com
engadget.com
I finally had to mute Elon with the terrible memes and too many tweets in the feed. I could have sworn I did this a couple of months ago, so I'm surprised I had to do it again.
His tweet around "absolute block versus percent block" made sense to me, but even so every single time I load twitter his tweets are at the top of my page, it's too much and I wouldn't be surprised if he does have a factor enabled due the changes I have seen recently.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1625368108461613057?s=20
A fitting punishment.
The folks taking their accounts private aren't doing any sort of scientific test, and there are folks who try it who don't see engagement go up. Unless you're somehow doing statistically significant tests with large groups of users, the same content, at the same time, there are an immense number of confounding variables here.
To me it seems logical, if you find a certain type of error like that, you go searching elsewhere to see where previous coders made the same kind of mistake. (Even when previous coder = myself)
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1624660886572126209?s=46...
It's deeply sad and funny that he's gutted Twitter so badly that, instead of having a team that could investigate these user complaints and determine whether they have merit and what the cause is, the CEO of a major tech platform resorted to "Huh, weird, let me try. LOL that's crazy."
Looks to me like the ability to investigate and respond to problems has improved if you ask me.
Brings into question what the CEOs of Tesla and SpaceX are doing with their time. Also investigating bugs at Twitter, you say? Amazing that the CEOs of three companies are all working to solve Twitter’s problems. Must be the off season in space.
Wouldn't surprise me if these "mistaken" blocks were reverted soon.
I'm sure the author wouldn't want people insulting her over unhinged articles or other obvious things.
Or you could just follow the CEO's Twitter:
"Musk participated in a Twitter Spaces Friday night about childhood exploitation, and responded to one of the participants on Saturday after she linked to an old tweet of Roth’s.
“Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to access adult Internet services in his PhD thesis,” tweeted Musk, with an excerpt from the 300-page dissertation."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/12/elon-musk-smears-for...
I'd take any of their claims with a huge grain of salt.
That said, doxxing people's location in real-time absolutely is a security risk and kidnapping is nothing to laugh about.
I believe it's an unethical choice to donate to the legal fund of someone intentionally and stubbornly engaging in that kind of behavior (and even working around technical barriers built by regulatory bodies to do so).
Part of my job is working with the Twitter API. If someone gave you a week's notice of a major breaking change, with no details, then delayed it multiple times - still without any details, to this date! - you'd be feeling some frustration with Musk as well.
https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1621026986784337922
https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1623467615539859456
https://twitter.com/TwitterDev/status/1625234161010343941
(I'm one of the luckier ones; it's only part of what I do. The Tweetbots and Twitterifics of the world have even more reason to be upset.)
> That said, doxxing people's location in real-time absolutely is a security risk and kidnapping is nothing to laugh about.
The claim that ADS-B tracking results in kidnappings is laughable.
It definitely gives some context that you're dealing with similar issues now, so thanks for sharing that point.
> The claim that ADS-B tracking results in kidnappings is laughable.
Please respond in good faith. As you know, the account in question was doing extra work to de-anonymize planes enrolled in the Privacy ICAO Address (PIA) program. You also know that rich people and their children are very common kidnapping targets. At no point did I say "ADS-B tracking results in kidnapping". I said the doxxer was creating a clear security risk.
>Even with the knowledge that the doxxing is leading to stalkers endangering not just the wealthy target but also his young child, you would fund the doxxer? That’s pretty monstrous. If there is a kidnapping or murder down the line, your money will have helped enable it.
It looks like there was a perfectly accurate representation of what you said. At least your current claim is a little more tempered:
>I believe it's an unethical choice to donate to the legal fund of someone intentionally and stubbornly engaging in that kind of behavior
Your characterization of supporting @ElonJet seems to have changed from complicity in child murder to merely making an "unethical choice". That's quite the walk-back.
No, it’s not. I still do think the donation would be monstrous, and that if there were a murder or kidnapping enabled by the doxxing, that it would be on the donor’s conscience for the rest of their life.
That doesn’t mean I have to help ceejayoz derail and inflame this thread, more than two months later. Phrasing my position less aggressively was an intentional choice.
Also, taking the most extreme snippet of what I said in an extended conversation out of context is not an accurate representation.
A key part of what I said is the conditional you quoted from my post that ceejayoz removed. I said, if there were a murder or kidnapping caused by the doxxing activity then the money donated in support of it will have…supported it.
The cheek! What do they think they are, investigative journalists?!
> and they have no appetite for any positive stories.
That's Tesla's PR department's job, or would be, if it still had one. The broader news media does not generally prioritise praising companies to the heavens.
Seriously, this is all completely normal. There's no market for repeating what a company says publicly; most writing about companies is at least sceptical, and sometimes adversarial.
As ridiculous as it is, they probably do think of themselves that way.
It's too bad they gave up on truth-seeking and gravitated towards tabloid drama and reputational attack. There's a huge void when it comes to high-quality reporting on tech entrepreneurs. Sadly, it really does tend to either be hit pieces or press releases with little in between.
One example completely unrelated to Twitter, that I saw as a sign of shockingly poor research, was when the founder went on the Big Technology Podcast and spoke at length about "John Carmichael" and VR work at Meta. It's hard to believe that anyone actually in the software world, especially someone talking about VR with such confidence wouldn't be familiar enough with John Carmack to get his name right.